Roller Coaster Tycoon: Mobile Wait For Three Hours Edition

What happens if you only listen to half of what someone tells you about a game? You end up buying a game which they told you not to buy because “you’ll probably not like it.”

Which is exactly what happened when I bought Roller Coaster Tycoon 4 Mobile, for €2,80 (over three dollars).

Roller Coaster Tycoon is the perfect example of taking a game people used to love and then crushing that dream by driving over it with a roller coaster at 120km/h. We should have been warned, with a description that says something like “comes pre-loaded with more than $5 of in-game currency”.

Pay-to-play

Rollercoaster Tycoon is a free-to-play game with a catch – you’ve got to pay to purchase the app. From that point on it’s a bumpy ride on the rollercoaster of monetization.

The concept of Roller Coaster Tycoon has always been simple. Build a cool theme park, draw a crowd and watch the cash roll in. Also, roller coasters. This would have made for a great iOS game but it isn’t. If we ignore the money grabbing scheme (which we can’t), here’s the reasons why you shouldn’t pay-to-play this game.

Controls from hell: Building your park is a huge pain in the ass. There is no way to rotate the camera (that we found), building a roller coaster is even more complex than in the PC games and appears to be flat out broken (with roller coasters which you can’t continue to work on for whatever reason).

Gameplay from hell: the controls aren’t great. But that’s not the worst part. The really bad part is that the game doesn’t even wait for 2 minutes without slapping you in the face with “tickets”s you need to complete your buildings. 5 minutes into the game, you are being told to “wait for two hours” before a simple attraction is completed. Or, you could use an expensive ticket. After playing the game for only five minutes.

We stopped playing after those five minutes, basically being blocked from performing basic actions in that game. We would have gladly paid for other things in the game. I am thinking cool attractions, or roller coasters, or more money. But to charge people for performing the most basic function in a game? Nah. That’s where we draw the line.

So that’s another childhood game crushed. Thanks, Atari! Well, at least Roller Coaster Tycoon 4 for PC and Mac has also been announced…